The present invention relates to a control-panel assembly for household appliances and to a household appliance provided with such control-panel assembly.
In particular the present invention relates to a control-panel assembly for home laundry washing and/or drying machines, to which the following description refers purely by way of example without implying any loss of generality.
As is known, almost any currently marketed front-loading home laundry washing and/or drying machine comprises: a substantially parallelepiped-shaped, rigid outer boxlike casing structured for resting on the floor; a substantially bell-shaped washing tub which is suspended in floating manner inside the casing, directly facing a laundry loading and unloading through opening realized in the front face of the casing; a substantially cylindrical, elastically-deformable bellows which connects the front opening of the washing tub to the laundry loading and unloading opening formed in the front face of the casing; a porthole door which is hinged to the front face of the casing to rotate to and from a closing position in which the door closes the laundry loading and unloading through opening in the front face of the casing to seal the washing tub; and a substantially cylindrical, bell-shaped revolving drum structured for housing the laundry to be washed and/or dried, and which is housed inside the washing tub in axially rotating manner about its substantially horizontally-oriented longitudinal axis.
In addition to the above, the laundry washing and/or drying machine is provided with an electrically-powered motor assembly which is located immediately outside of the washing tub, and which is structured for selectively driving into rotation the revolving drum about its longitudinal axis inside the washing tub; with an outer manually-operated control panel which is usually located on the front face of the casing, immediately above the laundry loading and unloading opening; and with an electronic central control unit which is structured for directly controlling the electric motor of the motor assembly and other electrically-operated component parts of the household appliance, according to the washing and/or drying cycle selected by the user via the control panel.
In the currently marketed laundry washing and/or drying machines, the manually-operated control panel comprises: a rigid shell-shaped dashboard which usually forms part of the upper portion of the front face of the outer boxlike casing; an internal printed circuit board which is generally provided with one or more manually-operated rotatable knob selectors and/or buttons and/or switches and/or LED warning lights and/or alphanumeric displays necessary for allowing the user to manually select the desired washing and/or drying cycle among the ones stored in the central control unit; and a substantially basin-shaped, rigid protecting box, which houses and directly supports the printed circuit board, and is structured for being firmly fixed to the back of the dashboard via anchoring screws.
More specifically, the manually-operated rotatable knob selectors, buttons, switches, warning lights and/or alphanumeric displays are all located on the upper face of the printed circuit board, i.e. on the face opposite to the bottom of the protecting box; and the protecting box is firmly fixed to the back of the dashboard, with the mouth facing the dashboard, so that the board upper face supporting all rotatable knob selectors, buttons, switches, warning lights and/or alphanumeric displays is directly faced to the back of the dashboard.
The outer dashboard, in turn, is provided with a number of pass-through openings and/or seats which are spatially arranged and dimensioned for being engaged respectively by the shaft of the rotatable knob selector, and by the other buttons, switches, warning lights and/or alphanumeric displays of the printed circuit board, so that the shaft of the knob selector, and each other button, switch, warning light, and/or alphanumeric display jutting out of the protecting box can fit into a corresponding pass-through opening or seat realized on the dashboard.
Obviously the shaft of the rotatable knob selector has to be always locally substantially perpendicular to the outer surface of the dashboard, thus an almost perfect alignment is requested between the protecting box that supports the internal printed circuit board and the corresponding pass-through openings and seats on the dashboard.
Unluckily this strict assembly requirement causes the protecting box of a control-panel assembly suitable for a front-loading laundry washing and/or drying machine to be completely different in shape from the protecting box of a control-panel assembly suitable for a top-loading laundry washing and/or drying machine, even if the internal printed circuit board is usually identical for both household appliances.
In fact, on front-loading laundry washing and/or drying machines the control-panel assembly is located on the front wall of the casing, and the front face of the dashboard is substantially vertically oriented and convex in shape; whereas on top-loading laundry washing and/or drying machines the control-panel assembly is located on the top wall of the casing, and the front face of the dashboard is tilted to the vertical and substantially concave in shape.
Obviously, the need to have two different protecting boxes structured for housing an identical printed circuit board greatly influences the production, warehousing and managing costs associated to a control-panel assembly for household appliances. Thus the savings correlated to the sharing of a control-panel assembly between a number of top-loading and front-loading laundry washing and/or drying machines are relatively small.